by Dan Simmons
As they came up out of the sand onto the low gorse and needle grass of the ridge, Martin Silenus could not take his eyes from the ruins of the City of Poets. Lamia had cut left around it, avoiding everything but the stones of the half-buried highways that circled the city, other roads leading out into the barrens until they disappeared beneath the dunes.
Silenus fell farther and farther behind until he stopped and sat on a fallen column, which had once been a portal through which the android laborers filed every evening after working in the fields. Those fields were gone now. The aqueducts, canals, and highways only hinted at by fallen stones, depressions in the sand, or the sand-scoured stumps of trees where once they had overhung a waterway or shaded a pleasant lane.
Martin Silenus used his beret to mop his face as he stared at the ruins. The city was still white … as white as bones uncovered by shifting sands, as white as teeth in an earth-brown skull. From where he sat, Silenus could see that many of the buildings were as he had last seen them more than a century and a half ago. Poets’ Ampitheatre lay half-finished but regal in its ruin, a white, otherworldly Roman Colosseum overgrown with desert creeper and fanfare ivy. The great atrium was open to the sky, the gallerias shattered—not by time, Silenus knew, but by the probes and lances and explosive charges of Sad King Billy’s useless security people in the decades after the evacuation of the city. They were going to kill the Shrike. They were going to use electronics and angry beams of coherent light to kill Grendel after he had laid waste to the mead hall.
Martin Silenus chuckled and leaned forward, suddenly dizzy from the heat and exhaustion.
Silenus could see the great dome of the Common Hall where he had eaten his meals, first with the hundreds in artistic camaraderie, then in separation and silence with the few others who had remained, for their own inscrutable and unrecorded reasons, after Billy’s evacuation to Keats, and then alone. Truly alone. Once he had dropped a goblet and the echo rang for half a minute under the vine-graffitied dome.
Alone with the Morlocks, thought Silenus. But not even Morlocks for company in the end. Only my muse.
There was a sudden explosion of sound, and a score of white doves burst from some niche in the heap of broken towers that had been Sad King Billy’s palace. Silenus watched them whirl and circle in the overheated sky, marveling that they had survived the centuries here on the edge of nowhere.
If I could do it, why not they?
There were shadows in the city, pools of sweet shade. Silenus wondered if the wells were still good, the great underground reservoirs, sunk before the human seedships had arrived, still filled with sweet water. He wondered if his wooden worktable, an antique from Old Earth, still sat in the small room in which he had written much of his Cantos.
“What’s wrong?” Brawne Lamia had retraced her steps and was standing near him.
“Nothing.” He squinted up at her. The woman looked like some squat tree, a mass of dark thigh roots and sunburned bark and frozen energy. He tried to imagine her being exhausted … the effort made him tired. “I just realized,” he said. “We’re wasting our time going all the way back to the Keep. There are wells in the city. Probably food reserves too.”
“Uh-uh,” said Lamia. “The Consul and I thought of that, talked about it. The Dead City’s been looted for generations. Shrike Pilgrims must have depleted the stores sixty or eighty years ago. The wells aren’t dependable … the aquifer has shifted, the reservoirs are contaminated. We go to the Keep.”
Silenus felt his anger grow at the woman’s insufferable arrogance, her instant assumption that she could take command in any situation. “I’m going to explore,” he said. “It might save us hours of travel time.”
Lamia moved between him and the sun. Her black curls glowed with the corona of eclipse. “No. If we waste time here, we won’t be back before dark.”
“Go on, then,” snapped the poet, surprised at what he was saying. “I’m tired. I’m going to check out the warehouse behind the Common Hall. I might remember storage places the pilgrims never found.”
He could see the woman’s body tense as she considered dragging him to his feet, pulling him out onto the dunes again. They were little more than a third of the way to the foothills where the long climb to the Keep staircase began. Her muscles relaxed. “Martin,” she said, “the others are depending on us. Please don’t screw this up.”
He laughed and sat back against the tumbled pillar. “Fuck that,” he said. “I’m tired. You know that you’re going to do ninety-five percent of the transporting anyway. I’m old, woman. Older than you can imagine. Let me stay and rest a while. Maybe I’ll find some food. Maybe I’ll get some writing done.”
Lamia crouched next to him and touched his pack. “That’s what you’ve been carrying. The pages of your poem. The Cantos.”
“Of course,” he said.
“And you still think that proximity to the Shrike will allow you to finish it?”
Silenus shrugged, feeling the heat and dizziness whirl around him. “The thing is a fucking killer, a sheet-metal Grendel forged in hell,” he said. “But it’s my muse.”
Lamia sighed, squinted at the sun already lowering itself toward the mountains, and then looked back the way they had come. “Go back,” she said softly. “To the valley.” She hesitated a moment. “I’ll go with you, then return.”
Silenus smiled with cracked lips. “Why go back? To play cribbage with three other old men until our beastie comes to tuck us in? No thanks, I’d rather rest here a bit and get some work done. Go on, woman. You can carry more than three poets could.” He struggled out of his empty packs and bottles, handing them to her.
Lamia held the tangle of straps in a fist as short and hard as the head of a steel hammer. “Are you sure? We can walk slowly.”
He struggled to his feet, fueled by a moment of pure anger at her pity and condescension. “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Lusian. In case you forgot, the purpose of the pilgrimage was to get here and say hello to the Shrike. Your friend Hoyt didn’t forget. Kassad understood the game. The fucking Shrike’s probably chewing on his stupid military bones right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the three we left behind don’t need food or water by this point. Go on. Get the hell out of here. I’m tired of your company.”
Brawne Lamia remained crouching for a moment, looking up at him as he weaved above her. Then she got to her feet, touched his shoulder for the briefest of seconds, lifted the packs and bottles to her back, and swung away, her pace faster than anything he could have kept up with in his youth. “I’ll be back this way in a few hours,” she called, not turning back to look at him. “Be out on this edge of the city. We’ll return to the Tombs together.”
Martin Silenus said nothing as he watched her diminish and then disappear in the rough ground to the southwest. The mountains shimmered in the heat. He looked down and saw that she had left the water bottle for him. He spat, added the bottle to his load, and walked into the waiting shade of the dead city.
TWENTY
Duré all but collapsed while they were eating lunch from the last two ration paks; Sol and the Consul carried him up the Sphinx’s wide stairway into the shade. The priest’s face was as white as his hair.
He attempted a smile as Sol lifted a water bottle to his lips. “All of you accept the fact of my resurrection rather easily,” he said, wiping the corners of his mouth with a finger.
The Consul leaned back against the stone of the Sphinx. “I saw the cruciforms on Hoyt. The same as you wear now.”
“And I believed his story … your story,” said Sol. He passed the water to the Consul.
Duré touched his forehead. “I’ve been listening to the comlog disks. The stories, including mine, are … incredible.”
“Do you doubt any of them?” asked the Consul.
“No. It is making sense of them that is the challenge. Finding the common element … the string of connection.”
Sol lifted Rachel to his chest, rocking her slightly, his hand on
the back of her head. “Does there have to be a connection? Other than the Shrike?”
“Oh yes,” said Duré. A bit of color was returning to his cheeks. “This pilgrimage was not an accident. Nor was your selection.”
“Different elements had a say in who came on this pilgrimage,” said the Consul. “The AI Advisory Group, the Hegemony Senate, even the Shrike Church.”
Duré shook his head. “Yes, but there was only one guiding intelligence behind this selection, my friends.”
Sol leaned closer. “God?”
“Perhaps,” said Duré, smiling, “but I was thinking of the Core … the artificial intelligences who have behaved so mysteriously through this entire sequence of events.”
The baby made soft, mewling noises. Sol found a pacifier for it and tuned the comlog on his wrist to heartbeat rates. The child curled its fists once and relaxed against the scholar’s shoulder. “Brawne’s story suggests that elements in the Core are trying to destabilize the status quo … allow humankind a chance for survival while still pursuing their Ultimate Intelligence project.”
The Consul gestured toward the cloudless sky. “Everything that’s happened … our pilgrimage, even this war … was manufactured because of the internal politics of the Core.”
“And what do we know of the Core?” asked Duré softly.
“Nothing,” said the Consul, and threw a pebble toward the carved stone to the left of the Sphinx’s stairway. “When all is said and done, we know nothing.”
Duré was sitting up now, massaging his face with a slightly moistened cloth. “Yet their goal is oddly similar to our own.”
“What’s that?” asked Sol, still rocking the baby.
“To know God,” said the priest. “Or failing that, to create Him.” He squinted down the long valley. Shadows were moving farther out from the southwestern walls now, beginning to touch and enfold the Tombs. “I helped promote such an idea within the Church …”
“I’ve read your treatises on St. Teilhard,” said Sol. “You did a brilliant job defending the necessity of evolution toward the Omega Point—the Godhead—without stumbling into the Socinian Heresy.”
“The what?” asked the Consul.
Father Duré smiled slightly. “Socinus was an Italian heretic in the sixteenth century A.D. His belief … for which he was excommunicated … was that God is a limited being, able to learn and to grow as the world … the universe … becomes more complex. And I did stumble into the Socinian Heresy, Sol. That was the first of my sins.”
Sol’s gaze was level. “And the last of your sins?”
“Besides pride?” said Duré. “The greatest of my sins was falsifying data from a seven-year dig on Armaghast. Trying to provide a connection between the vanished Arch Builders there and a form of proto-Christianity. It did not exist. I fudged data. So the irony is, the greatest of my sins, at least in the Church’s eyes, was to violate the scientific method. In her final days, the Church can accept theological heresy but can brook no tampering with the protocols of science.”
“Was Armaghast like this?” asked Sol, making a gesture with his arm that included the valley, the Tombs, and the encroaching desert.
Duré looked around, his eyes bright for a moment. “The dust and stone and sense of death, yes. But this place is infinitely more threatening. Something here has not yet succumbed to death when it should have.”
The Consul laughed. “Let’s hope that we’re in that category. I’m going to drag the comlog up to that saddle and try again to establish a relay link with the ship.”
“I’ll go too,” said Sol.
“And I,” said Father Duré, getting to his feet, weaving for only a second, and refusing the offer of Weintraub’s hand.
The ship did not respond to queries. Without the ship, there could be no fatline relay to the Ousters, the Web, or anywhere else beyond Hyperion. Normal comm bands were down.
“Could the ship have been destroyed?” Sol asked the Consul.
“No. The message is being received, just not responded to. Gladstone still has the ship in quarantine.”
Sol squinted out over the barrens to where the mountains shimmered in the heat haze. Several klicks closer, the ruins of the City of Poets rose jaggedly against the skyline. “Just as well,” he said. “We have one deus ex machina too many as it is.”
Paul Duré began to laugh then, a deep, sincere sound, and stopped only when he began coughing and had to take a drink of water.
“What is it?” asked the Consul.
“The deus ex machina. What we were talking about earlier. I suspect that this is precisely the reason each of us is here. Poor Lenar with his deus in the machina of the cruciform. Brawne with her resurrected poet trapped in a Schrön loop, seeking the machina to release her personal deus. You, Sol, waiting for the dark deus to solve your daughter’s terrible problem. The Core, machina spawned, seeking to build their own deus.”
The Consul adjusted his sun glasses. “And you, Father?”
Duré shook his head. “I wait for the largest machina of all to produce its deus—the universe. How much of my elevation of St. Teilhard stemmed from the simple fact that I found no sign of a living Creator in the world today? Like the TechnoCore. intelligences, I seek to build what I cannot find elsewhere.”
Sol watched the sky. “What deus do the Ousters seek?”
The Consul answered. “Their obsession with Hyperion is real. They think that this will be the birthplace of a new hope for humankind.”
“We’d better go back down,” said Sol, shielding Rachel from the sun. “Brawne and Martin should be returning before dinner.”
But they did not return before dinner. Nor was there any sign of them by sunset. Every hour, the Consul walked to the valley entrance, climbed a boulder, and watched for movement out among the dunes and boulder field. There was none. The Consul wished that Kassad had left a pair of his powered binoculars.
Even before the sky faded to twilight the bursts of light across its zenith announced the continuing battle in space. The three men sat on the highest step of the Sphinx’s staircase and watched the light show, slow explosions of pure white, dull red blossoms, and sudden green and orange streaks which left retinal echoes.
“Who’s winning do you think?” said Sol.
The Consul did not look up. “It doesn’t matter. Do you think we should sleep somewhere other than the Sphinx tonight? Wait at one of the other Tombs?”
“I can’t leave the Sphinx,” said Sol. “You’re welcome to go on.”
Duré touched the baby’s cheek. She was working on the pacifier, and her cheek moved against his finger. “How old is she now, Sol?”
“Two days. Almost exactly. She would have been born about fifteen minutes after sunset at this latitude, Hyperion time.”
“I’ll go up and look one last time,” said the Consul. “Then we’ll have to build a bonfire or something to help them find their way back.”
The Consul had descended half the steps toward the trail when Sol stood and pointed. Not toward where the head of the valley glowed in low sunlight, but the other way, into the shadows of the valley itself.
The Consul stopped, and the other two men joined him. The Consul reached into his pocket and removed the small neural stunner Kassad had given him several days earlier. With Lamia and Kassad gone, it was the only weapon they had.
“Can you see?” whispered Sol.
The figure was moving in the darkness beyond the faint glow of the Jade Tomb. It did not look large enough or move quickly enough to be the Shrike; its progress was strange … slow, halting for half a moment at a time, weaving.
Father Duré glanced over his shoulder at the entrance to the valley, then back. “Is there any way Martin Silenus could have entered the valley from that direction?”
“Not unless he jumped down the cliff walls,” whispered the Consul. “Or went eight klicks around to the northeast. Besides, its too tall to be Silenus.”
The figure paused again, wea
ved, and then fell. From more than a hundred meters away, it looked like another low boulder on the valley floor.
“Come,” said the Consul.
They did not run. The Consul led the way down the staircase, stunner extended, set for twenty meters although he knew the neural effect would be minimal at that range. Father Duré walked close behind, holding Sol’s child while the scholar hunted for a small rock to carry.
“David and Goliath?” asked Duré when Sol came up with palm-sized stone and set it in a fiberplastic sling he had cut from package wrap that afternoon.
The scholar’s sunburned face above the beard turned a darker color. “Something like that. Here, I’ll take Rachel back.”
“I enjoy carrying her. And if there’s any fighting to be done, better the two of you have free hands.”
Sol nodded and closed the gap to walk side by side with the Consul, the priest and the child a few paces behind.
From fifteen meters away it became obvious that the fallen figure was a man—a very tall man—wearing a rough robe and lying face down in the sand.
“Stay here,” said the Consul and ran. The others watched while he turned over the body, set his stunner back in his pocket, and removed a water bottle from his belt.
Sol jogged slowly, feeling his exhaustion as a kind of pleasant vertigo. Duré followed more slowly.
When the priest came into the light thrown by the Consul’s hand torch, he saw the hood of the fallen man pushed back from a vaguely Asian, oddly distorted long face lighted by the glow of the Jade Tomb as well as the torch.
“It’s a Templar,” said Duré, astonished to find a follower of the Muir here.
“It’s the True Voice of the Tree,” said the Consul. “It’s the first of our missing pilgrims … it’s Het Masteen.”
TWENTY-ONE
Martin Silenus had worked all afternoon on his epic poem, and only the dying of the light made him pause in his efforts.
He had found his old workroom pillaged, the antique table missing. Sad King Billy’s palace had suffered the worst of time’s insults, with all windows broken, miniature dunes drifted across discolored carpets once worth fortunes, and rats and small rock eels living between the tumbled stones. The apartment towers were homes for the doves and hunting falcons gone back to the wild. Finally the poet had returned to the Common Hall under the great geodesic dome of its dining room to sit at a low table and write.
